Introduction: The State is "Back in"

Abstract

In his essay of 1958, "Was There a Renaissance State?" Federico Chabod proposed that states did emerge in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but he was properly cautious in equating Renaissance states with modern states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 He considered alien to the Renaissance state such essential features of the modern state as patriotism, national identity, and boundaries. Even the term "state," or stato, did not acquire its celebrated modem impersonality-its distinctness from the person of the ruler-until the eighteenth century.2 It was nevertheless axiomatic, Chabod argued, that Renaissance balance-of-power diplomacy was predicated on the existence of states. He was familiar with Max Weber's claim that the Italian signoria "was the first political power in Western Europe which based its regime on a rational administration with (increasingly) appointed officials."3 On the basis of Weber's sociology of the bureaucratic state and the city and Otto Hintze's studies on the formation of states and the Prussian civil service, which were still in vogue at the time he composed his essay, Chabod was led to argue that the salient characteristic of the Renaissance state was a staff of trained officials with distinctive routines and